Raised Close Herringbone

This stitch was made for feathers I think. 🐓🐓🐓.  And leaves, but feathers are pretty cool and you don't need to pack the stitches in quite as tight if you are doing leaves.  

I've also finished sewing back up my DMC colour chart fabric book which I'm pleased about.  I've replaced the spine and the pages actually only a lot flatter as well.  I'm not 100% sure why the spine wasn't opening properly, but it is now.  So yay a good job done.

And thanks to getting all the new DMC colours the other week I even had the perfect red to do another window on my quilt project this weekend - nice!  In saying that I haven't finished the curtains that I'm supposed to be making but shhh don't tell anyone!  😊

Thanks for stopping by!

Oops I got sidetracked!

So there has been absolutely no progress on the embroidery on my quilt since my last post.  I've done some testing to find some quicker options for the window frames, without a lot of success I might add.  But we've been having a heat wave and with no air conditioning (cause its not usually warm enough to need it) and sitting under the quilt top has not been at the top of my to-do list.  Especially not sitting under my sewing lamp which gets quite warm all by itself.

Anyway... I still felt like sewing.  So as I've no doubt mentioned before I'm still hunting for the 'perfect' sampler idea.  And I still haven't found it.  But I have found stumpwork samplers and spirit clothes and things like that and I like those.  They are made of small individual embroideries so I was heading down that track.  And I dunno... somehow I decided to make buttons or brooches... or small round things, whatever you want to call them.  So I've made some of those.

Here's the few starting ones.  The first four are about 3cms round (-ish)  which at the time I thought was quite small.  So the heart is 5cm which is quite a jump in size and is quite large.  So the last one is about 4cm which seems a better size, not too big not too small.  I haven't got a button maker or anything like that so these just have a piece of cardboard in them and the two larger ones have a bit of thin batting in between the embroidery and the card.



I think they're cute.  And while they might look a bit sad currently pinned to a spare piece of grey t-shirt fabric hopefully once there's a whole pile of them they'll look good.  Different sizes, fabrics and colours.  Keeps me out of trouble and gives me something to do in the evening rather than watching Netflix! haha.  

I'm still lurking on the TAST Facebook page, this week they're doing Raised Close Herringbone (tutorial is here).  I have done this stitch before but not as part of TAST so I'm going to work on doing a Chicken Little for that over the weekend.  And I have a set of curtains to make.  And fingers crossed I might get some time to work on the quilt.

I think thats it from me... Thanks for stopping by.

More progress and some shopping (yay!)

Firstly to the shopping... One of our local shops finally has the new DMC colours so as a birthday treat I bought one of each of the new colours.  Is it weird that makes me really happy?  I guess some of it is my control freak nature.  And some of it is that I've felt a bit cheated since the colours came out when I spent what felt like so long building up a full set.  When they went and released another 35 colours my wonderful colour swatch book was suddenly incomplete again!   Mind you I do have to agree there were some gaps in their range. 

So I have sewn up swatches for 25 of the 35 colours and just the last 10 to go.  It will mean I need to unbind my book of swatches mind you, but I've never been totally happy with the way the binding works (and looks if you look closely enough) so maybe thats a good thing.

As for my houses quilt/embroidery I've made some good progress today.  I admit now I couldn't face another window today - I really must find another (quicker) way to do the windows.  

Anyway so I made a start on the lamp post outside of House number 2, that came together pretty nicely I think.  For the post itself I used a full 6 strands of DMC and then used buttonhole to couch it down.  For the light, I used some felt to get a bit of height and then used long/short stitch to cover the felt.  I'm quite pleased with how it came out.

I'd done the door for the house last weekend but the door frame was bothering me.  The painting has just some white dots on the black surround and a French knot wasn't going to be big enough as its about an inch wide (and I already have plenty of French knots).  So I tried a single strand with some detached chain and some tiny French knots, it looked Ok so I carried on.  I did at this point use a ruler (oh no!) just to make sure the straight stitches were about the same height on both sides (or there abouts) to make sure when I got to the top things were in the right place to go around the corner.

For the door I back stitched the planks down the door in a slightly darker colour than the fabric, then put a few slightly darker straight stitches for provide some shadows.  The horizontals are two rows of back stitch which I think whipped to get a more pronounced line.  Then I back stitched around the whole door to provide a bit of definition with the slightly darker brown.  It wasn't until it was too late that I realised that the wee gap around the door should actually sit out a bit from the door (per the painting) but oh well.  I can't fill it in now even with couching as of course I didn't use a ruler so the gap is uneven.  But oh well its not like its supposed to be a real house anyway 😆.  The door handle is just a couple of straight stitches across and a large one to connect them, I then buttonholed the vertical stitch.  So if you had really tiny fingers you could actually pull on the door handle, wouldn't help you open the door but thats not the point right? haha.

Stitches used since my last post:

Detached Chain, couching, buttonhole, split stitch, whipped split stitch & back stitch.

P.S.  The final count of French knots on the tree was approximately 2100 - thats a lot of French knots!

Thanks for stopping by!